Build Your Vocabulary with Huggable 18th-Century Favorites

What are men to wool and needles? Brothers Jack and Holman Wang, the creative minds behind the Google Doodle for Laura Ingalls Wilder’s 148th birthday, are making eighteenth-century classics more huggable with their unique needle-felted adaptations. Their celebrated board book series, Cozy Classics, embraces well-loved titles like Emma, Les Misérables, and Jane Eyre as inspiration for their charming take on the infant primer. This March, Cozy Classics re-launches with Chronicle Books, introducing a new title, Great Expectations, as well as re-issued versions of several popular books including Pride and Prejudice.

The Cozy Classics mission is bold yet humble: to support “an engaged and affectionate relationship with books” by refashioning each classic in the series into a collection of twelve words and accompanying needle-felted illustrations. Each word is simple and intentionally chosen to reflect a child’s world. Although these amiable books may be read without any reference to the original classics, the words were chosen with narratives in mind. If you have a child in your life and a gift for storytelling, you can certainly fill in the gaps and invite young readers to expand their interpretation of the tales as they grow.

Image via Cozy Classics

Also included in the re-launch are The Nutcracker (Fall 2016), The Wizard of Oz (Spring 2017), and a new series called Star Wars Epic Yarns (just recently released). Not familiar with the titles? Parents in need of a quick review or curious about the original works will appreciate the Cozy Classics website, which offers a friendly, clickable list of available books and their synopses, character lists, and quotations from the original literary landmarks. Welcoming the representative words of memorable stories to the familiar cast of colors, shapes, and numbers, Cozy Classics are a delightful addition to the genre of infant primers.

Of course we’re waiting for huggable renditions of Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe, but we would also love to see Cozy Classics try their hand at other eighteenth-century favorites like Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote. For more news about the series or the creators follow Cozy Classics on Facebook and Twitter and encourage them to craft stories that you enjoy.

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Editor’s Notes

When I first volunteered to work with our parent journal, ABO (which was then stillAphra Behn Online), I had a smattering of web design experience and the belief that the academy was ready to stretch beyond the paperbound paradigm that defined the best scholarship. I was lucky enough to work with two talented and passionate…